Page 113 of Stepbrothers with Benefits
To be fair to Milo, he hadn’t dealt with Eva for years, so her reaction came off as the one he feared most from people. I, however, had dealt with her and knew her, not nearly asmuch as I could claim I knew Milo, but enough to know this was...relatively safe. She had come all the way out here to yell at us, or more likely to yell at me, and the first thing she’d brought up was that I hadn’t told her I’d been seeing someone else. If she had been fuming but distant over text while avoiding me, or had brought up that she knew Milo and I were...something, those would have been warning signs.
Not that I wasn’t in for an earful, but it was the kind of earful thatprobablywouldn’t end in complete disaster.
“Actually,” she continued, clearly not ready to give either of us a chance to explain, let alone defend ourselves. That was, of course, standard operating procedure when Eva got herself nice and worked up. The best thing was to let her get to where her point was at least somewhat made, and then see if our explanations either sent her into another rant or calmed her down. “I don’t need to say ‘who knows how long’ because I have a very good idea of how long it’s been. I’m guessing, right around the same time you suddenly lost all interest in sex withme.”
That was my cue to speak, and I cleared my throat. “A little before that, but yeah.”
Milo made a soft protest noise, a sign that he was reeling from Eva’s rather forceful intervention. Eva’s nostrils flared at my words. “Well, yeah, I figured. You slowed down a while ago, hitting me up for a fuck, but you were never that horny. When it stopped outright? I knew something was up, I fuckingknew, and you were willing just to let me sit in the dark?”
“It wasn’t…” Milo began and stopped when Eva’s eyes flashed to him, silencing him as I shook my head, reinforcing the need for him to be quiet.
“We had an agreement,” she shot at me, willing to let Milo’s ‘slip’ go without comment. It was not a kindness on her part, I knew, but because her primary focus, at least for the moment, was on me and what I had done wrong. That was helpful becauseI was better equipped to deal with her when she was pissed off than Milo was, especially when he seemed to be having a hard time finding his breath while she ranted. “We both agreed we would be honest with one another, that if we started seeing someone else, we’d fess up. Hell, not just because we still shared a bed occasionally, but because we’re supposed to befriends.And we were definitely supposed to be sharing that we’d been sleeping with other people, which you said you weren’t.”
She glared at me, and I realized my turn to speak had come again, but there was one problem. “You...are not going to like what I say about that.”
“I’m already not liking this conversation,” she snapped, crossing her arms over her chest and glaring fiercely. “So you might as well spit it out.”
“Oh God,” Milo groaned, either because he was still struggling or because… “Please tell me you didn’t do the Eli thing.”
“WhatEli thing?” she growled. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
I sighed. Yeah, he definitely knew me a little too well. “When you asked me if I was seeing someone?—”
“You lied,” she hissed.
“Uh...no,” I said, and Milo hung his head, guessing what I was going to say. “You asked if I was seeing someone else. Specifically, you asked if I was seeing some other girl. You specified?—”
“You fuck,” she snapped, and I wasn’t surprised in the slightest when she chose to yank off one of her shoes and chuck it at me, bouncing it off my forehead and sprinkling me with melted snow and a bit of wet dirt. “That is convenient, isn’t it? You absolute shithead.”
“Eli,” Milo chided softly, clearly having recovered enough to give me shit.
“I panicked, okay?” I groaned, giving him a pitiful look. “I wasn’t ready for her to start asking about that, and then the next thing I knew, she was. I didn’t want to lie to her, but I-I wasn’t ready to tell her the truth, okay? So I’m sorry, I panicked, I made a bad call, and this is where we’re at right now.”
Eva glowered. “You didn’t trust me.”
“It wasn’t about trust,” I said quickly, because it wasn’t about trust.
“It sure as hell sounds like you didn’t trust me,” she said between clenched teeth. “And I thought we knew each other better than this.”
“We do,” I insisted, a guilt I should have acknowledged before finally bubbling up. “We’re friends, Eva. We’ve been friends for a long time, and I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth before, alright? It’s been...a lot to take in, and I wasn’t ready to talk about it with anyone. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust you, it was?—”
“You weren’t ready,” she said stiffly, but I could see the tension in her jaw had eased a fraction, which was a good sign. “You said that already.”
“I wasn’t,” I said with a shrug, because what else was there for me to do when I was speaking the truth. It didn’t make me look great, but I’d be pretty hard-pressed to make myself look worse than I already did. “Look, I had only recently discovered that I was into guys, and that was...something.”
Milo’s gaze turned to me with a frown. “You said it wasn’t a big deal.”
“It wasn’t and it isn’t,” I told him, meeting his gaze so he understood I was telling him the truth by seeing in my eyes what I doubted anyone else but him could see. “Not enough to scare me or freak me out, or anything like that. But it was a change, a big change. It was something about myself that I had thought long since settled. Me being straight and not at all into guys, thatis, but then that changed. And while I didn’t make a big deal about it, that doesn’t mean there weren’tsomeadjustments in my head. I still don’t know if I’m just attracted to you, or if I’m discovering some latent bisexuality. But being confused and not ready to talk about it with anyone but you isn’t the same as being ashamed, okay? It’s just...a part of the heap.”
“How sweet,” Eva said dryly, but there was none of the anger in her voice, just impatience.
“And,” I continued, knowing full well that now was the time to get my part across before she picked up steam again. “Let’s be honest here, Eva, since you want full honesty. Milo and I might be okay with what’s happening, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t painfully aware of what it looks like to others. It doesn’t matter that the people closest to usmightbe okay with it, because that’s not guaranteed. Because people might not be okay with it, they might be the same people who were willing to give us shit over the years and joke about us being together, but suddenly knowing we are can make it...not okay to deal with.”
“We know people see us as brothers,” Milo added quietly, finally looking at Eva with a kind of nervous hope that made me hurt for him. I should have realized he was probably much more raw about this than I had originally believed. All too often, it was easy for people to see how he acted, able to go through life with a smile and not a care in the world, and believe it to be true, and it seemed that I was just as prone to falling into the lie despite knowing better. “We know how people will act about that sort of thing.”
“What, are you magically not brothers?” Eva scoffed, and I winced.
Milo, however, stared at her intently, never pulling his eyes away. “There isn’t one bit of shared blood between us. We only have the title ‘brothers’ because our parents fell in love and married before I felt that way about him.”
